When everything you look at starts to speak to you,
you have wholly embarked upon the journey.
When everything you see secretes its magic in your direction,
the path has begun to leak its secret.
As the migrants of long ago would say: the explorer becomes the path, in
the end.

Since you know this from the start, you won’t hurry,
but experience, in silence, the moment you become the path.

So, the point you are at is farther than ever
from the crowd. Your only place
is the explorer’s roofless,
volatile home.
You belong to yourself now.
Acquainted with no one.
No one knows you
besides yourself.
The fish lines that wrap around the flesh of noise
have been pulled,
their tips thinned,
they dangle from your hemline.

On the path’s solid ground, you will see the threads
dangling from your skirt dissolve completely. In the end, not a single
trace
of noise will mark you.
Soon, you shall dilate into non-existence.

You belong only to yourself. Light as a fairy,
not even a cloud. Now you can prolong yourself
only by scattering, spreading, pouring, flitting yourself about.
You own no name, except the one you have given yourself.
You can leave every place, everything as it is and go;
you can always be on the move.
You shall leave no mark upon anything you touch,
nor collect the names of anyone you see.

As the journey progresses, you will see how many things
you can see in any one thing. Your eye, with your own eye.
Once you see your eye, ineffably will you
rise, rise, rise.
Up there, perceive that the crowds are too small
for your new body.

If you rise a little higher,
you’ll reach a place
where you cease to mourn your rootlessness.
You now consist only of yourself.
You belong only to yourself.
This is humanity’s most crowded, most bountiful condition:
you will love the taste of it, won’t want to become again
anyone’s something, even their most precious thing.
Even if you want to, you won’t really succeed.

You are an explorer now. To humankind,
you’re as dangerous as a bottomless cliff.
To humankind, who multiplies by adding on, who remains, who struggles
to remain,
you’re a poisonous plant.

You are now a Venus flytrap.

You are the conjurer of fears,
the unveiler of the veiled,
the breaker of makeshift unions.
For, you are proof of the possibility of leaving.
You are the explorer.

You’ve found pleasure in the things you’ve seen. You’ve seen the danger
in that pleasure.
Perhaps you’ll always remain on the road,
enraptured.
You could fall in love with the silencing magic
of seeing many things in any one thing.
Some time later, you may speak very little.

Even if you want to stop, to turn back, you can’t.
Since you don’t know how to turn back, from now on
you shall keep going.

Fish